Matthijs Lok

Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.

In this article several new publications on the critics of the Enlightenment are reviewed. These works build partly on the legacy of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of the Counter-Enlightenment, but they also emphasise the problematic nature of his essentialistic and timeless interpretation of the Counter-Enlightenment tradition. The authors argue that the so-called enemies of the Enlightenment should in fact be examined as part of the Enlightenment itself, and that the Enlightenment cannot be understood without studying its self-proclaimed enemies.

This article examines the examines the experience of (dis-)continuity and temporal confusion of 1814 from a comparative perspective, with France and the Netherlands as case studies. In France the Restored Bourbons emphasized the ‘renewal of the chain of time’ in an attempt to forget the revolutionary past. The temporal continuity with Henri IV was underscored and the perception of historical distance to the sixteenth century was minimized. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands there existed a more complex attitude to the era of the wars of religion. On one hand the sixteenth century Dutch revolt against Spain was used a frame to interpret the end of the Napoleonic rule in the Netherlands. On the other hand, the superiority of the nineteenth century over the sixteenth century was expressed in many Dutch pamphlets and the years ‘1813-1815’ were described in Dutch public opinion as a ‘new beginning’ in national time. Finally the problem of (dis-) continuity is studied from the comparative perspective of the girouette (turncoat or ‘political weathervane’). The girouette in both countries epitomizes the personal and institutional continuity between Empire and Restoration, but also symbolizes the adaption to the new political circumstances and the reinvention of individual pasts.

Cet article pose la question de l’éventuelle possibilité d’exporter le concept d’« extrême centre » du champ français vers d’autres pays européens, ayant connu à partir de 1795 et sous l’Empire, l’influence ou le modèle d’une politisation ou d’une administration de type français. « L’extrême-centre » compris comme la politique de la modération couplée à un exécutif fort et à

This article examines the examines the experience of (dis-)continuity and temporal confusion of 1814 from a comparative perspective, with France and the Netherlands as case studies. In France the Restored Bourbons emphasized the ‘renewal of the chain of time’ in an attempt to forget the revolutionary past. The temporal continuity with Henri IV was underscored and the perception of historical distance to the sixteenth century was minimized. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands there existed a more complex attitude to the era of the wars of religion. On one hand the sixteenth century Dutch revolt against Spain was used a frame to interpret the end of the Napoleonic rule in the Netherlands. On the other hand, the superiority of the nineteenth century over the sixteenth century was expressed in many Dutch pamphlets and the years ‘1813-1815’ were described in Dutch public opinion as a ‘new beginning’ in national time. Finally the problem of (dis-) continuity is studied from the comparative perspective of the girouette (turncoat or ‘political weathervane’). The girouette in both countries epitomizes the personal and institutional continuity between Empire and Restoration, but also symbolizes the adaption to the new political circumstances and the reinvention of individual pasts.

... par grace de dieu, roi de France et de Navarre' zijn feestelijke intocht in de ... De katholieke bekeringsmissies in de Franse steden en op het platteland pro-beerden juist de ... staatsinstellingen: de Raad van State, de Staatssecretarie in het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, de Conseil d ...

Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.